"Listen to him, he knows", declared the grocer's wife confidently. So Mr HG found himself giving an impromptu seminar on the financial crisis, backed up against the pasta shelves and fronted by the biscuits while the crowd of interested listeners drew additions from passers-by in the street.
As he laid out how Italy was relatively unexposed to many of the causes of the trouble, protected by conservative practice and a vigilant Mr Draghi acting more than a year ago on over-enthusiastic investment in high returns by relatively innocent public bodies; as he he succinctly explained the terms and content of higher finance, his audience listened gravely and judiciously.
"I'm in gold bars myself", remarked an elderly lady who'd come in for a small loaf and an etto of prosciutto cotto. "Not in the bank though" remarked another in lisle stockings with outside temperatures of 25 degrees (it's October - time for stockings, rules are rules). All assented that there wasn't a lot of point going into gold and then leaving it in the bank.
Usually he gets paid quite a lot of money for these kinds of discourses. And to add insult to injury, they all had much more gold than we have, solidly supporting their families/old age/ future needs. What is more, he had the uneasy feeling that it was a far better thing to give of his best, than try to put them off with a few platitudes.
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